The present invention relates to removable medium processing apparatus and recording and reproducing apparatus which are used to activate a medium accessing function of an upper apparatus when a power source of the recording and reproducing apparatus using a removable medium such as optical disk, magnetic disk, floppy disk, or the like is turned on or the medium is inserted into the apparatus. More particularly, the invention relates to processing apparatus and recording and reproducing apparatus for a removable medium, in which firmware of the recording and reproducing apparatus reads out and analyzes medium information which is necessary to start access of the removable medium and responds to a command from the upper apparatus.
In recent years, various kinds of removable apparatuses such as magnetic tape apparatus, CD drive, DVD drive, MO drive, floppy disk apparatus, large capacity floppy apparatus, and the like which can be used for various kinds of computer apparatuses, a television, a video deck, and the like have appeared. It is also necessary to cope with various kinds of logic formats by one drive in correspondence to various interfaces such as IDE, SCSI, UBS, IEEE1394, and the like. However, in the present situation, it is impossible to easily interchange a control of the logic format by the OS of an upper apparatus with respect to various logic formats which media inserted to the removable apparatus have.
Hitherto, as for a basic input output system BIOS known as a basic input output system provided for the upper apparatus, any basic input output system BIOS recognizes a partition table of the medium, executes a bootup process, and transfers a control to a system program, thereby allowing a boot process to be executed. That is, the basic input output system BIOS fixedly sets medium information necessary for the bootup of the logic format or the like of the medium by its own set-up menu. Therefore, when a power source of the upper apparatus is turned on in a state in which the medium has been inserted in the removable apparatus, the basic input output system BIOS installed in a mother board of the upper apparatus executes the bootup process on the basis of the medium information set by the set-up menu, loads a boot program from the medium into a main storage of the upper apparatus, executes the boot process by the OS, and establishes an enable state of the input/output access to/from the removable apparatus. The reason why the basic input output system BIOS executes the bootup process serving as a head portion of the boot process without executing the boot process itself is because a memory capacity (capacity of an ROM) on the mother board in which the basic input output system BIOS has been installed is small.
In recent years, however, one removable apparatus has supported a plurality of kinds of logic formats held by a plurality of operating systems OS which operate in the upper apparatus. It is a situation in which the bootup by the conventional basic input output system BIOS in which the medium information has fixedly been set by the set-up menu cannot easily cope with a variety of many logic formats. That is, the logic formats of the media are fixedly set by the set-up menu of the basic input output system BIOS. Therefore, when the medium format is different, even if the basic input output system BIOS executes the bootup process, an error occurs in a menu display of a program list when the boot program is loaded from the medium, so that the booting process cannot be executed. In case of inserting the removable apparatus into a computer apparatus (plug-in manner) and using, when a power source of the plug-in removable apparatus is turned on and the medium is inserted, the operating system OS recognizes that the inserted medium is a medium having the logic format established by the bootup process by the basic input output system BIOS at the time of turn-on of the power source and the boot process by the execution of the boot program of a hard disk drive HDD. Consequently, when the logic format of the inserted medium is different, the access to the removable apparatus by the operating system OS causes an error and cannot be supported.